Boston Dynamics is to launch its first robot on the market before the end of this year. It is about the Spot, a four-legged robot that can propel itself flexibly and stably over all kinds of terrain.
This is announced by Marc Raibert, CEO at Boston Dynamics, in an interview with The Verge. Boston Dynamics is a company that has gained name recognition thanks in part to all kinds of videos of its robots. These include videos of Spot trying to open a door, where it is thwarted by employees.
Another is Atlas, a robot that, like humans, stands on two legs and can navigate over all kinds of obstacles. In a video, the robotics company demonstrated how Atlas runs along a course and jumps on and over objects without any problems.
Contract with DARPA
Boston Dynamics is an American company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In its early years, the company worked with, among others, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). For instance, the company signed a contract worth $10.8 million to develop about seven robots for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
The company was acquired in 2013 by the then Google X, the R&D division of Google's parent company Alphabet that today goes by the name of X. Since the company would not become profitable in the short term, Boston Dynamics was acquired by SoftBank in June 2017. This Japanese company is known, among other things, for the social robot Pepper.
PETMAN, Cheetah and SandFlea
Over the years, Boston Dynamics has developed a variety of robots. One example is the protective suit testing-oriented PETMAN and the four-legged walking robot Cheetah, which managed to set a speed record for robots with legs at 45 km/h. Another example is SandFlea, a wheeled robot that can jump up to 8 metres high.
The company gained real name recognition with BigDog, a four-legged robot that resembles a dog and was developed with funding from DARPA. The system was later further developed under the name Legged Squad Support System (LS3) into a military variant capable of supporting soldiers in war zones. The project was eventually shut down after the US military judged that LS3 produces too much noise to be deployable on the battlefield.
Bringing robots to market
Despite the wide range of robots Boston Dynamics has developed, the company has so far not launched any products on the market. This will change this year, according to CEO Raibert. The company plans to produce and sell around 100 SpotMinis in 2019.
The SpotMini is marketed as the 'Android of robotics'. It is about a platform on which other parties can build to meet specific needs. "We specifically developed it as a platform that can be customised for many different types of users," Raibert explains in the interview. Using tools that can be mounted on the Spot, it is possible to make the robot suitable for a variety of tasks. So far, these include a robot arm that can grasp and manipulate objects, sensors such as thermal sensors and 360-degree cameras, and radio modules that allow Spot to provide communication.
Incidentally, this is not the first time Boston Dynamics has announced it will make a product commercially available. Back in May 2018, Raibert announced plans to do so. Two months later, the CEO told Gizmodo that the company would be able to produce around 1,000 robots a year by July 2019. The company did not reach this milestone.
Author: Wouter Hoeffnagel
Source: The Verge
